The Orchids (3 page)

My father frowned. “What is it?”

I stiffened my back reflexively. “Nothing, Father.”

“That smile, what was that for?”

“Nothing.”

My father squeezed my shoulders. “Answer me!”

I could not.

My father stood up instantly and stared down at me with intense disapproval. “How can you smile after what I've told you?” he said angrily.

“I was not smiling,” I said quickly. The very idea of sugar cookies became nauseating.

My father glared at me, then raised his hand and slapped my face. I could hear the sound of the blow ringing through the park.

“You dishonor me!” he cried.

“No, Father.”

“You dishonor me!”

I lowered my head.

He took my chin in his hand and lifted it up. “You are like your mother,” he said. His face showed his disgust.

“I'm sorry, Father,” I said desperately.

“Like your mother. Stupid. Stupid.”

For a moment I saw myself positioned in his sense of the Chain of Being, a vile, crawling thing that sickened him unspeakably.

“I didn't mean to do it,” I whined. “I didn't mean to smile. It was the sugar cookies.”

My father's face hardened. “Sugar cookies?”

“Yes.”

“Sugar cookies? What are you talking about?”

“From the bakery on Telemannstrasse,” I explained. “They are making them. They smell sweet.”

“How can you think of such things?”

“It was just the smell,” I said, trembling. “I didn't mean to smile.”

My father dropped to the bench, his shoulders slumping forward. “Sugar cookies,” he muttered.

Then I saw defeat. Not in France, but in him. “Father, I'm sorry,” I said weakly.

My father's head bent forward. I could almost see my face reflected in the sleek smoothness of his skull.

“I didn't mean to smile, Father,” I said again.

He looked at me. “You must learn to care about things, Peter. Do you think the world is sweet? Do you think it is made of sugar cookies?”

“No, Father,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

My father shook his head. “It doesn't matter,” he said wearily. And then, in a low voice, almost to himself, “They will come here. We are at their mercy now.”

“Who?”

“The enemy.”

In my childishness I could not even be sure exactly who the enemy was.

“It'll be all right, Father,” I said.

“I don't know what will happen now,” my father said without looking up.

“Nothing will happen. It will be all right,” I said. I felt the urge to touch his shoulders, but I was afraid to do it.

“They will come here,” my father said. “The enemy.”

And then in my imagination I saw them, the enemy. They were not people at all, but great, woolly monsters. In my mind I saw them clawing up the pavement of the Unter den Linden and scratching their matted, filthy behinds on the lofty archway of the Brandenburg Gate.

O
LD MEN
watch the world from a certain distance. From the heights of my verandah I can see Esperanza as she bends over the river scrubbing my white linen shirts on a large flat stone. There are no modern conveniences in El Caliz. And throughout the Republic there are very few. Of course, in El Presidente's palace the rooms are stacked to the ceiling with every imaginable mechanical contraption. He is a connoisseur of all the little humming trinkets of advanced industrial society. From the great enterprising nations he imports thousands of toasters, televisions, electric pencil sharpeners, and the like. It is said that he has devoted one huge hall to the working of such things. The walls are empty save for row upon row of electrical outlets. These he uses to feed a current through a jungle of extension cords powering hundreds of small machines, infinite in their variety. When he pulls the switch, they clang and hiss and sizzle, and it is said that nothing can be heard above this metallic bedlam except the gleeful laughter of El Presidente.

Esperanza slaps a shirt against a stone. The very monotony of her action makes it clear that part of the tedium of the primitive lies in the incessant passing of day into day until the nature of labor becomes, finally, the nature of life. The lowly character of Esperanza's work reflects the low esteem with which she and all her kind are regarded by El Presidente. And yet Esperanza has triumphed over the debased quality of her circumstances. From within the depths of her impoverishment she has seized a spirit in its flight and prisoned it within the confines of her potions and incantations. She has captured God, and dispenses his indecipherable favors to the villagers who gather nightly in her hut. They come to hear their futures spun out from Esperanza's mouth like the endless string of Fortune's wheel. Will the child be a changeling? Will the sugar cane rise tall in season? Will the bats suck dry the herds? To all these questions Esperanza gives certain answer, and the villagers, in the desperate precariousness of their need, remember when she is right and forget when she is wrong.

In the Camp, there were others such as she, people who claimed special powers of clairvoyance and enchantment. The withered vermin came to them, begging for blessings from their bony fingers. They sat hollow-eyed and shivering while these prophets rolled their eyes toward the sky. They pleaded with a special fervency for news concerning lost family and friends. The prophets listened quietly, then bleated these same questions heavenward, knowing all the time that the ashes of the loved ones were smoldering in the crematoria.

Esperanza bats at a mosquito, then turns back to her work. Loudly, she slaps the shirts onto the rock, then kneads them with her fists. The sky is bleaching overhead. Heat in El Caliz acts as a great sponge, sucking up speculation. The heat is the given, a world unto itself, beyond which nothing is truly imaginable. El Presidente, however, has three huge air conditioners in his gilded throne room. He has attached long multicolored ribbons to the vents so that they blow wildly in the air, filling the room with the sound of their snapping. In the unnatural cool El Presidente may exercise his mind, hatching exotic visions of deflowered maidens and the smooth brown thighs of uninitiated boys. But Esperanza, slowly cooking in the heat, can think only of God and water.

The Archbishop of the Republic also thinks of God, though less of water. He serves as spiritual adviser for El Presidente and acts as personal emissary between His Excellency and God. Often, he sits in the left-hand corner of the throne room, snoozing beneath his vestments. But there are times when he is said to rise and whisper advice into El Presidente's gnarled ear. Citizens are not privy to the Archbishop's recommendations, although it is known that on occasion he has warned against the education of the masses, a suggestion based upon his fear that they have not yet been properly prepared for the burdensome responsibilities of intelligence.

Thus, learning in the Republic remains a matter of seed and prayer. The seed is winnowed from the ripening crops and gathered up in burlap bags. These sacks are held in the Central Warehouses, which are the exclusive possessions of El Presidente. On occasion — and at a whim — he is said to have denied access to these cordoned and garrisoned depositories, and whole villages have disappeared. It is not within the competence of El Presidente to hoard the fruits of prayer.

Esperanza finishes her last shirt and rises, placing the large basket of clothes on her head. She lumbers toward the main house, her feet sinking slightly into the sodden clay along the riverbank. Her determined lurch suggests resolute purpose. She has taken on the intransigence of her task, and each gesture reflects this hard determination. Clothes must be cleaned because I, Don Pedro, have required it. There can be no turning from the task. The spirit world that flutters in her brain must momentarily retire into its own tumid cavern. It cannot be allowed to swirl in the soap and water, cannot be permitted to becloud the priority of labor.

Two separate worlds coexist in the Republic: leisure and labor. Labor does not purchase leisure. It is a dreary coin that can buy nothing but more of itself. Leisure is the prerogative of birth. In the great rubber estates to the east, the children of the aging barons snore quietly under the vaporous whiteness of gently fluttering marquisette. For them, all labor is reduced to tending periodic disturbances of the head and bowels. They are born into a world of latticework and vine, marry under an arboreal arch, betray their spouses in a pool of water lilies, stupefy themselves with vodka imported from the workers' paradise, and wait for their elders to die amid the priestly mummery of Christ. When at last they come into their legacy, there is nothing for them to do but acquire. And so they import vast quantities of luxury goods from the great nations of the developed world. They fill their halls with television sets, stock their kitchens with refrigerators and electric mixers — though often the web of electric wire that crisscrosses the Republic does not extend to their distant haciendas. Hence the tedium is unrelieved, and the local elite merely lounge on French settees or stand blank-faced as the portraits of Fragonard under enormous, tinkling, but unlit chandeliers.

For them, El Presidente — both the real one and that of the outlawed poet Casamira's wild invention — has nothing but contempt. Born from the grimy union of a sheep-herder and his toothless wife, he has seen the fire blazing on both sides. In the humid forests to the south, El Presidente came of age among the squalor of his kind. He saw banditti nail his brother to a jute tree and drunkenly throw darts at a crude target carved upon his. chest; saw his simple-minded cousin dragged slowly to death by a team of burros through a field of stumps and briar; saw his mother spit a clot of maggots from her mouth three days before she died. Beneath all his lunatic vainglory, El Presidente understands the Republic, understands the craving of the fallen for the holy, understands that nothing less than man transmogrified into God can hold the leprous body still. And no one in the Republic more clearly knows the value of a lie.

In Casamira's
Official History of the Republic
, El Presidente's birth is described thus:

El Presidente did not come easily to his people. The birth was long and torturous, and his mother, Mary, a gentle woman of the village and beloved by all the inhabitants there, behaved throughout her ordeal with that patience and self-sacrifice which have become the hallmarks of her firstborn son.

El Presidente's mother was named Juanita. She had already borne seven children, four of whom had died, one of them under suspicious circumstances having to do with a cliff.

But on to the
Official History:

For three days Mary fought for the life of El Presidente. And it is reported by those present at this momentous occasion that her son was delivered into the world wholly clean of any blood or tissue, so that he emerged from the womb without taint or blemish. It is also reported that the sun broke over the ridge at the precise moment of his birth, coming a full three hours before the accustomed sunrise and bathing the surrounding countryside in a gentle, embracing light.

El Presidente's life is full of trinities. He is three days in the birthing. The sun rises three hours early on the day of his nativity. No special attention is drawn to these facts in the
Official History
. Its subject, after all, is no ordinary vulgarian.

To continue:

The birth of El Presidente was celebrated by all the village. This was not the usual custom in the southern provinces, but from the beginning the native intuition of the peasantry was made manifest. Men who seek only after reason will be dumbfounded by the world. But men who sense its mysteries will be rewarded with understanding.

And so El Presidente was born into a land in which intuition triumphed over inquiry, in which faith shackled sense, in which knowledge was seen as the handmaiden of confusion.

The Leader, when he ascended, drew up millions in his train, driving them into the cloud of his mythology with the power of a great machine, so that they became annealed to him, a part of his fiery workings, enmeshed in the warp and woof of his person and intent. And surely if his origins were less auspicious than those recorded for El Presidente, the perverse majesty of his end dwarfs all those feeble pretenders who have followed him seeking to emulate, to surpass.

But now let us pass El Presidente's allegorical debut and move toward his divinely ordained development:

Nurtured among the idyllic surroundings of the southern provinces, El Presidente reveled in the beauties of nature and their profound import. From the start, he seemed possessed by nature. Among the peasants, he was known to be one who could divine the mysteries of wind and water. He could predict the coming of rain and once saved his village from a terrible storm by confronting the rampaging elements with his own body and demanding their retreat.

Thus, in the Republic, nature is both good and evil, an animated spirit that both conserves and debauches. Those “possessed by nature” are good, perhaps divine, but only if they can overcome nature's Manichean aspect, harness its schizophrenic drive toward both redemption and destruction. El Presidente, by piercing into the mystical heart of nature, enslaved it. In the Republic, to know a thing is to conquer it.

And again:

From earliest youth, then, El Presidente was regarded with awe by the simple people of the village. They came to him with their problems and he endeavored to acquaint them with the facts of their existence. No easy task in the southern provinces.

And what are these facts of existence which it is no easy task to teach in the southern provinces? The
Official History
enumerates them:

Satan coils under every shrub.

All things must serve the common good.

A people who do not believe in their own destiny will not have one.

Sheep herds should not be kept less than one kilometer from human habitation.